What company could release such a product. No, it couldn't be ... naw ...

[Peter P.]

Simon <simon80 at ...> writes:

> Well, where I was coming from was that in the case where this app
> shuts down, the user is presented with a completely unlocked OS, and
> unfettered access to a keyboard.  Therefore, it follows that
> regardless of the platform, whoever designed that system likely
> wouldn't have made it robust, they're clearly not thinking very hard
> about it.

Or they did not have any other choice (for lack of mechanisms to control the OS
in case of such a failure - f.ex. watchdogs are mandatory for 24/365 unattended
operations for a reason - in their case a watchdog could have rebooted the
machine - this would likely not have cleared the fault but at least it would
have tried to - safe failure is another issue that is mandatory for systems with
24/365 and public access). The competition's idea of safe failure is to give
access to the keyboard so a support person can reboot.

Or they did not have the experience of having such choices (i.e. they never saw
a POS running on Linux before). In the monolith borg world the desktop is
everything. Even servers have desktops. One simply cannot control the desktop
entirely from user mode. Many Windows installations used in Kiosk mode show this
poignantly (and painfully) all over the world. Examples were given here on this
thread, and I also saw a few, even stock tickers in bank windows go blue from
time to time. It sure looks nice. Provided they show up at the right time and
place. The POS failure was definitely not the right time and place imho. I think
that a new ad for Linux should be a large screen showing the bluescreen and
underneath a caption saying something like 'You tried to go where you wanted to,
but it didn't make it. Seek relief at www.LINUX.org' (this could be rearranged
as a Haiku but I am not good at that).

I have seen Linux kiosk installations and they were solid. I also made some
things based on stand-alone machines running NetBSD + X11 + Wish + custom
hardware and custom NetBSD drivers for applications for industrial control. When
it works, it works. No redefinitions of causality there.

Peter


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